, working too quickly can damage your score. Many problems hinge on subtle points, and most require careful reading of the set-up. Because high school can put heavy
reading loads on students, many will follow their academic conditioning and read questions quickly, looking only for the gist of what each is asking. Once they have found it, they mark their answer and move on,
confident they have answered it correctly. Later, many are startled to discover that they missed questions because they either misread the problems or overlooked subtle points. To do well in your classes, you have to
attempt to solve every, or nearly every, problem on a test. Not so with the SAT. In fact, if you try to solve every problem on this test you will probably decimate you score (it's called negative marking). For the vast
majority of people, the key to performing well on the SAT is not the number of questions they answer, within reason, but the percentage they answer correctly.
SAT Scoring
The two parts of the test are scored
independently. You will receive a verbal score and a math score. Each score ranges from 200 to 800. The average for both is 500. Thus, the average total score is 1,000.
In addition to the scaled score, you will be
assigned a percentile ranking, which gives the percentage of students with scores below yours. For instance, if you correctly answer 48 of the 60 math questions, then you will score better than 90% of the other test
takers.
Order of Difficulty
Like most standardized tests, the SAT lists problems in ascending order of difficulty. Therefore, when trying to decide which questions to skip, skip the last ones.
Each SAT
section has subsections. Within these subsections, the problems also ascend in order of difficulty. For example, the verbal section has three subsections (Sentence completions, analogies, and reading comprehension). So,
for example, Question 1 will be the easiest, and Questions 10 will be the hardest. Then, Question 11 (the first analogy question) will be the easiest analogy, and so on.
Skipping and Guessing
Some questions
on the SAT are rather hard. Most test takers should skip these questions. We'll talk about how to identify hard questions as we come to them.
Often students become obsessed with a particular problem and waste
valuable time trying to solve it. To get a top score, learn to cut your losses and move on. So skip the hardest questions and concentrate on the easy and medium ones. Often you'll find that you can correctly solve
several easy questions in the time it takes to tackle one hard one. Since all questions are worth the same number of points, don't waste your time on something you cannot handle.
Although there is a small guessing
penalty on the SAT, if you can eliminate even one of the answer-choices, it is to your advantage to guess.
2 Out of 4 Rule
It is significantly harder to create a good but incorrect answer-choice
than it is to produce the correct answer. For this reason, usually only two attractive answer-choices are offered: One correct; the other either intentionally misleading or only partially correct (the ETS claims that
this is to
